The present invention relates generally to a system for exchanging medical information. More particularly, this invention relates to a server-based system which effectively exchanges patient-related messages between healthcare providers, prioritizes messages based on message content, routes messages to optimal recipients based on messaging forwarding algorithms, monitors the read status of messages after they have been sent, alerts healthcare providers when a high priority message has not been read, and performs message analysis to determine if a breakdown in communication between healthcare providers is likely to occur.
Communications breakdowns are one of the greatest causes of fatal and nonfatal medical errors in the United States. An estimated 200,000 fatal medical errors occur each year, 70% of which are attributable to a breakdown in communications between healthcare providers. Many of these communications breakdowns are systematic in nature; one in seven messages is sent to the wrong clinician, and thirty percent of all messages go unanswered by the recipient. Furthermore, paging can interrupt clinician workflows between ten and twenty times per hour, causing clinicians to spend more time processing communications than performing direct patient care. As such, healthcare providers often fear interrupting physicians with pages even when a problem is occurring.
As a result, messages will often go undelivered, and many that are delivered are ignored because the healthcare provider is not in a position to read or act upon the message. Forwarding the message to a healthcare provider who is in a position to read or act upon the message takes additional time and often requires contextual information not available to the sender or receiver of the message. Therefore, critical messages pertaining to a patient's healthcare often get lost amid the din of digital communications, often resulting in fatal medical errors.